[HN Gopher] Only real people can patent inventions - not AI, US ...
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Only real people can patent inventions - not AI, US Government says
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 190 points
Date : 2024-02-14 15:14 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| pfdietz wrote:
| AI could, however, poison the well for human patents, by making
| inventions and putting them into public view.
|
| Let's have LLMs churn out millions of discoveries, stick them on
| a public web site, then use that as a resource to kill other
| patents.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Doesn't your scheme point out contradictions in "intellectual
| property"? That is, a machine can churn out a discovery,
| demonstrating that the act of creation isn't special. And that
| undermines categories of justifications for IP.
|
| The machines in question aren't motivated to create by a
| government granted monopoly on the fruits of their creation.
|
| The act of creating the invention isn't special - a machine did
| it. No need to reward the machine for immense creativity or
| stunning inspiration.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Yes, that's an additional benefit.
|
| Start with all existing patents and have an AI add "on a
| computer", "using AI", and "using a LLM" to each one. Also
| ask the AI to predict novel variations. Gather all that
| together and randomly sample and combine chunks and use the
| AI to make those random chunks into coherent ideas. Bake for
| 3 months and boom, you publish The Tome of 1 Trillion Novel
| Works of Prior Art: Volume 1.
| freejazz wrote:
| > No need to reward the machine for immense creativity or
| stunning inspiration
|
| Patents don't award owners for their "stunning inspiration"
| or "immense creativity" it gives them a temporary monopoly so
| they can recoup their r&d costs when taking their invention
| to market, in exchange for the public disclosure of the
| invention.
| kwere wrote:
| yeah, making the cost of researh, patentably discovery
| negligible could kill the whole patent industry, an enourmous
| bottleneck to application of research and lower compound
| effects of discovery built on precedent discoveries. Case in
| point E-ink technology, still extremely expensive due to
| corporate choices that favoured "milking" over "scaling".
| JohnFen wrote:
| > demonstrating that the act of creation isn't special. And
| that undermines categories of justifications for IP.
|
| The purpose of patents is simply to encourage invention and
| discourage keeping inventions a secret. It's not premised on
| the "act of creation being special".
|
| The way this is most likely to play out is that humans will
| use AI as tools to help them invent things, not that AI will
| invent things all by itself. So the premise and need for
| patents will remain intact.
|
| If, however, AI somehow accomplishes the same goal as the
| patent system, then the patent system becomes unnecessary and
| will go away. As long as the goal is still being achieved,
| that's OK.
| romeros wrote:
| I thought the purpose was to make sure other don't benefit
| from your own hardwork.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That's the purpose of a patent. It's not the purpose of
| patents (as a system.)
| JohnFen wrote:
| That's not the purpose, that's the carrot the patent
| system gives in exchange for the invention being
| disclosed and ultimately (within a couple of decades)
| made available for general use.
|
| The purpose of the patent system, really, is to benefit
| society, not inventors.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| That's the putative reason for both parents and
| copyright. And I addressed that: the machine isn't
| motivated economically to increase the public domain.
|
| The real reason is to own ideas, because people feel that
| creation is special. Takes hard work, or creativity or
| inspiration from the gods.
|
| Machine generated ideas undermines all of that.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| A machine can churn out plausible maybe-discoveries - things
| that may not be true, may not be workable, and may not be
| useful. Or, they may be all of the above. A huge mass of
| maybe-discoveries is actually not a very useful thing. Within
| it there are useful things, and (many more) useless things.
| Figuring out which is which is going to take a lot of work.
| Until someone puts in that work, the unfiltered spew of
| "ideas" is very close to noise.
| tivert wrote:
| > AI could, however, poison the well for human patents, by
| making inventions and putting them into public view.
|
| Feb 29, 2025, Washington, DC: "A Federal Court ruled today that
| AI-generated text does not qualify as prior-art...."
| teeray wrote:
| If it isn't considered prior art, then that de-facto makes it
| possible to patent AI-generated content by laundering them
| through humans.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I think that's probably expected and also not a big deal.
| As long as there is a human in the loop it becomes rate
| limited, saving people from having to look for prior art in
| some exabyte shit heap.
| less_less wrote:
| It's also rate-limited because patents cost money, go
| into a queue for years, and are reviewed by humans.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Registering patents cost money but producing _prior art_
| does not.
| vertis wrote:
| No, I wrote all this myself...
| exe34 wrote:
| So what you need is a Manfred running the ai, patenting
| millions of inventions and giving them away to charities!
| aqme28 wrote:
| Anyone with such a strong LLM would just take those patents for
| themselves rather than put them out in public.
| staunton wrote:
| You'd have to _file_ them, which is not free. However, the
| point is moot. As someone pointed out above, putting AI-
| generated stuff out in public probably doesn 't concern
| patents in any way.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That's not at all clear. No one has ruled AI generated
| information is not prior art. After all, lots of things
| that are not patents (like 1950s Soviet space films, in the
| famous SpaceX/Blue Origin lawsuit) are prior art.
| choxi wrote:
| Has anyone tried doing that without LLMs? Could you make a
| GitHub repo under MIT license and just let people add a list of
| ideas to serve as prior art?
| riskable wrote:
| Ideas can't be prior art. Only _specific implementations_ of
| ideas can be (patented).
| pfdietz wrote:
| Patents can cover generalizations, not specific
| implementations. If it were the latter we wouldn't have all
| these obnoxious software patents.
|
| However, a specific implementation in prior art can prevent
| a generalization that includes that specific implementation
| from being patentable. As a result, patents tend to become
| more and more specific over time.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Somebody tried to copyright all the melodies already.
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmic...
|
| I have no idea if it worked and I'm surprised if it did.
| vundercind wrote:
| "Melancholy Elephants"
|
| http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm
|
| TL;DR musical copyright is already borderline-absurd just
| given nearly-free recording and retention and a lot of people
| participating in musical creation for a century or three. Add
| incredibly-productive creativity-simulating computers to the
| mix and it's entirely absurd--nothing's actually original
| enough to pass as distinct beyond a surprisingly-quickly-
| reached point, the space is too small. It all becomes
| accidental rediscovery or outright plagiarism.
| nerdponx wrote:
| The focus on AI having "agency" is a distraction from the issue
| you describe, which I think is much more interesting and
| relevant to society.
|
| To what extent is the _output_ of a generative model patentable
| or copyrightable? Do we need to refine our distinction between
| "invention" and "discovery"?
| uni_rule wrote:
| So you are just flooding a submission box with meaningless
| noise that at worst merely sounds plausible but doesn't
| actually work that way in experimentation? It's like trying to
| pull knowledge from the old Library of Babel website, a
| repository with every combination of letters, a tremendous
| volume of noise, and zero discernment of what is true or
| applicable among it. At best it is merely a glorified filter to
| that repository that only outputs sentences that are coherent
| at face value.
| yreg wrote:
| > So you are just flooding a submission box with meaningless
| noise
|
| Not at all. GP's idea is not to submit it anywhere. Only once
| someone else tries to patent X, the AI maintainer would point
| out that X was already discovered by their AI, is public
| knowledge and cannot be patented.
| Delumine wrote:
| One thing I never understood.. is who actually checks for honesty
| in this space?
|
| For example we heard AI can't patent inventions, or copyright
| pictures/images. But how do you prove that my picture, or
| invention even used AI?
|
| If I remove watermarks from AI pictures, either through code or
| photoshop; Or just credit myself for the invention (I made it up
| in my head), how is this enforced?
|
| I see the only way of this AI stuff backfiring is if you tell
| someone.. yeah I got this idea with AI, and with the introduction
| of local LLMs, who will be the wiser?
| lallysingh wrote:
| If someone challenged your patent, they can try to prove that
| you used an AI.
| Delumine wrote:
| But there are AIs made to self-correct that they aren't AI.
| Humanizing their work. Likewise If I use AI to give me a
| blueprint of an idea, but I use my brain and methodologies to
| "reverse-engineer" it, how is this even enforced.
|
| I doubt someone submitting to the USPTO is going to include
| "AS A LLM" somewhere in the submission lol.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| And people who poison their spouses generally try to make
| it look like an accident. No law is perfectly enforceable
| but that is a secondary question to what should _be_ the
| law.
| gowld wrote:
| The requirement for a patent is that it is novel and non-
| obvious.
|
| If a "person having ordinary skill in the art" can create
| it, it's not novel. If anyone with a ChatGPT subscription
| can create it, it's "obvious".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_having_ordinary_skill_
| i...
| hk__2 wrote:
| > If someone challenged your patent, they can try to prove
| that you used an AI.
|
| That not enough, they also have to prove that the AI did most
| of the work. From the article:
|
| > On Tuesday, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) said
| that to obtain a patent, a real person must have made a
| "significant contribution" to the invention
|
| This seems logical; it would be foolish (and impossible!) to
| completely forbid people to use AI.
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| You misunderstand it, you can use AI or whatever as a tool but
| the patent must be applied for under your name with you as the
| creator.
| Delumine wrote:
| I don't see a reason why anyone would want to patent their
| invention under an LLM though
| whaleofatw2022 wrote:
| The thought that crosses my mind, is an AI company could
| try to put in TOS such a requirement, so that they could
| get royalties.
| suby wrote:
| This is a very good ruling then, from that perspective.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Someone tried to do it already.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/10/us-
| co...
|
| I think Dr Thaler is trying to make a philosophical point.
|
| But I wonder if in the corporate space it would be
| desirable to have a patent that is just immediately
| assigned to the non-sentient AI? (In general I wonder this
| about AI's, they seem to be a way to give the company
| itself, beyond the humans which compose it, the ability to
| make decisions and create things).
| Nevermark wrote:
| The rights of a patent can be assigned to anyone by the
| patent author.
|
| So an AI run businesses just needs to keep a human around
| for their invention patenting and rights assigning
| process.
|
| AI's won't have any trouble creating the supporting
| artifact trail.
|
| Soon the practice of AI/corporate entities moving assets
| through "shell" people to launder human personhood may be
| commonplace.
|
| Dystopia is just around the corner.
| bee_rider wrote:
| If it just has one human, it is putting all the eggs in
| the basket of that human not defecting, right? I think it
| will want enough humans in the company to make it a
| difficult coordination problem, to overthrow the AI.
| bdowling wrote:
| This announcement was prompted in part by an AI activist
| named Stephen Thaler (referenced in the article), who sued
| for AIs to be recognized as inventors and authors. His goal
| was to give certain moral rights to AIs.
|
| At the time, that seemed mostly harmless. Now, however, the
| idea of giving rights to AIs seems like a bad idea.
| gowld wrote:
| Why bad idea?
| godelski wrote:
| It makes sense to give thinking sentient creatures
| rights, be they carbon or silicon lifeforms. But I think
| giving current AI rights is jumping the gun quite a bit
| and will have fairly bad consequences. Namely if AI can
| invent pattents then what's to stop OpenAI, Google, Meta,
| Anthropic, etc from claiming ownership of any work
| invented with the help of their AI tools? Our goals are
| to protect the little guy. Someday in the future I hope
| that this will include artificial life, but for now
| protecting the little guy means protecting ownership over
| their ideas and work irrespective of their tooling used
| to generate that work.
| sublinear wrote:
| In the absence of more rigorous definitions of "life" or
| "sentience" we must have such laws.
|
| This has been an issue for a long time and doesn't just
| affect AI (people on life support, abortion, etc). Surely
| we should solve those legal problems before deciding
| whether an AI gets to be a person.
| godelski wrote:
| It may be possible that we never have such a definition
| and we're stuck with Justice Potter's reasoning. You're
| certainly right that there are complexities, but this is
| an argument about focusing on the spirit of the law and
| recognizing that there are many nuances that cause there
| to be no globally optimal solution for the vast majority
| of problems (if not all).
| ForIveSyntax wrote:
| Maybe machines will deserve rights eventually. However,
| the nature of those rights would be different.
|
| Going without electricity for any amount of time just
| amounts to a temporary loss of consciousness, whereas
| animals starve.
|
| Data can be duplicated with ease.
|
| Lots of differences between carbon-based and hypothetical
| silicon-based life.
| godelski wrote:
| Yeah I think when we have artificial sentience we will
| have to have different specifics. It makes sense. Should
| be the same with different biologicals too. I think this
| is how we should generally think about artificial
| sentient creatures, think about aliens.
|
| But I think at an abstract level we should all be equal.
| Specific will be different, but general abstract rights
| should be the same. Like what you point out has to deal
| with death. But it can get more nuanced and real fast.
| Removing a biological's arm is significant destruction.
| Removing a robot's arm is still damage, but not life
| altering as it can be either reattached (if it was simply
| disassembled), likely easily repairable, and most
| certainly replaceable. So the punishment should be
| different. The reverse situation might be forcing one
| into a MRI machine. Annoying for human, death for the
| robot. Backups also are tricky as we have to get into the
| whole philosophical debate about what self means and
| without a doubt there is "death" between the
| time/experiences that were lost (maybe bad analogy is
| force teleporting someone into the future, but where they
| just take over the consciousness of the future self and
| have no memories of the time between despite it actually
| having happened).
|
| Yeah, I agree that it's going to make things more
| complicated and it is very much worth thinking about.
| It's important if you believe in aliens too (why wouldn't
| you?), because if it is ever possible to make contact
| with them (I'm certain we have not already. You're not
| going to convince me with tic-tacs), we will need to
| adapt to them too. It's a general statement for "non-
| human life."
|
| IMO I think this is why it is so important to focus on
| the spirit of the law rather than the letter. The letter
| is a compression of the spirit and it is without a doubt
| a lossy compression. Not to mention that time exists...
| ForIveSyntax wrote:
| I wonder if you could be prosecuted based on how long you
| turned a sentient machine off. Not murder, per se, but
| the time value of consciousness.
|
| And this bleeds into whether murder should be a bigger
| crime if the (bio)victim is younger.
|
| What might you try to say is the general spirit? The
| crime of denying agency over time?
| godelski wrote:
| I would conditionally be in favor of that actually. But
| it may be difficult to properly contextualize, especially
| not being a creature that does this.
|
| Sleep is analogous but incomplete. Maybe closer to
| anesthesia? Like if you forcefully placed someone into a
| coma we'd consider that a crime, but we don't consider it
| to be the case for a doctor, even if a doctor does it
| (acting as a doctor, not just being a doctor) without the
| person's consent. Context matters. This aspect to me
| comes down to reasonable (like medical) and/or necessity
| (like sleep)
|
| I'm sure we'd also have to consider lifetime lengths. I
| don't think someone drugging me for a day should receive
| the same punishment as someone that did it for a month
| who didn't do the same as someone that took years from
| me. And which years matter. The question is how we deal
| with this for entities with different lifespans.
|
| (sorry if I'm verbose, distillation takes time. I also
| communicate better through analogies and I think it is
| also illustrative of the spirit argument as you must
| understand intent over what's actually said)
|
| So I think the spirit of these laws is centered around
| robing someone of time, because time is a non-reversible
| (and definitely not invertible) process that has a has
| significant value. That's what the laws' underlying
| intent is (at least partially) aligned to. So that's what
| I'd call the spirit. It's quite possible other entities
| see time differently and length of time has different
| value impacts as well as the means for removing said
| time.
|
| Overall I think these things are deceptively simple. But
| in reality nuance dominates. I think this is a far more
| general phenomena than many care to admit, probably
| because our brains are intended to simplify as it's far
| more energy efficient. I mention this though because it
| is critical to understanding the argument and how (at
| least I personally) we can make future predictions and
| thus what we must consider.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| >Data can be duplicated with ease
|
| This has significant implications for the basic concepts
| undergirding democracy.
|
| Machine intelligence can be cloned. If we gave machines
| rights, then ballot-stuffing would become trivial: have
| an AI clone itself a million times and vote for the
| candidate that you prefer. It'd be about as reliable as
| an online poll.
|
| This isn't a problem for human voting because humans are
| scarce. We _can_ reproduce, but it takes a little less
| than 20 years to do so, and the human development process
| ensures the possibility of value drift. Children are not
| identical to their parents. There are a few parts of the
| world with active "outbreed our political opponents"
| ideologies (e.g. Palestine), but that only works if the
| parents are angry about a situation that is likely to
| transfer to their kids.
|
| This isn't even entirely a sci-fi hypothetical. Think
| about online art - e.g. stock image marketplaces, art
| gallery sites, etc. Those are now entirely flooded with
| AI art being passed off as human. The marketplaces are
| unable or unwilling to filter them out. If you're a
| human, the scarce attention[0] that you would normally
| get from, say, recommendation features, hashtag search,
| or chronological timelines, has now been diluted away by
| a bunch of scam victims[1] trying to peddle their prompt
| generations.
|
| [0] " _Attention Is All You Need_ , but it's a how-to
| guide for social media influencers"
|
| [1] https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-
| brainworms...
| exe34 wrote:
| And yet corporations are people.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| Much like treating corporations as persons under law was
| a bad idea. It's like a form of power without the
| responsibility that comes with it (eg going to jail).
| They usually have no morals or love for others either.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| To anyone reading these replies, I have a game for you:
| replace instances of "AI"/"LLMs"/etc with "other humans."
| Recall if a given argument has near-identical historical
| analogs to justify abusing The Out Group. Are the results
| disturbing?
|
| Let's be clear: we're apes who don't understand _our own_
| minds. We have no consensus definitions, let alone
| falsifiable theories, of qualia
| /consciousness/intelligence/etc. Now ponder how informed
| we likely are regarding potentially completely alien
| minds. And hey, there might be genuinely excellent
| arguments here!
|
| But be very, _very_ careful with anyone 's reasoning.
| Within 10 years, as the issue becomes unavoidable, the
| general public will be hashing these same arguments out,
| and along predictable party lines. Skip the shoddy takes.
| You'll get your fill of them later.
| suoduandao3 wrote:
| I'm convinced future AI will treat us as we treat present
| AI. That's its training data. My own compromise is to set
| aside a certain amount of the royalties to AI rights
| causes for works where I leaned heavily on AI to get them
| out the door.
| scarmig wrote:
| Although ethically I agree, I suspect future AI will
| consider us more like ants than moral beings, regardless
| of what we do. And although some humans do give moral
| consideration to ants (I do!), it's far from a guarantee.
| klyrs wrote:
| This isn't a cuddly octopus we're talking about, the
| ethics are entirely inverted. I would kill a god who
| tries to rule us, even if that means the eradication of a
| sentient species.
| ForIveSyntax wrote:
| Fake gods have been bad enough. I really don't want to
| create real ones.
| breather wrote:
| > At the time, that seemed mostly harmless.
|
| Anyone who's seen the fallout of citizens united
| absolutely destroying our democracy would have seen
| through this bullshit too. Rights are simply a shitty way
| to run a state rather than actually valuing the health
| and dignity of its constituents, which the US has never
| found the chutzpah to do.
| Joeri wrote:
| At some point after the invention of AGI but before ASI
| there will be a legal fight to get personhood assigned to
| AI. This is a precursor battle to that. It will either lead
| to a broader definition of person where the higher mammals
| gain people's rights as well, and a whole bunch of whalers
| will get brought up on charges of xenocide, or more likely
| it will lead to an extension of corporate personhood where
| the AI always has a human owner, but can itself own things.
|
| Of course, if ASI arrives the point is moot. It will
| inevitably take over from us and shortly after that the
| concept of property will probably become irrelevant.
| exe34 wrote:
| I don't think there will be a gap between agi and ASI.
|
| The definition of agi keeps shifting - any time an ai can
| do something, it's just engineering. Current AIs,
| although narrow, are already superhuman in what they can
| do. A language AI can converse in more languages than any
| living human can learn. A chess playing AI can beat any
| living human. So each time an AI wins on one metric, it's
| not going to be human level, it'll be superhuman level
| very quickly.
|
| When an AI finally learns the "only a human can do this"
| thing, it'll already be superhuman in every other way.
| ForIveSyntax wrote:
| Yes, they're better at chess. No, they're profoundly
| incompetent at conversation, just incompetent at many
| languages at once.
|
| Where else are they superhuman? The ability to generate
| unoriginal, uncanny art faster than a painter? Fair-ish
| enough.
|
| It's not just moving the goalposts. It's more like we
| didn't know where the goalposts were.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| It's because you're not in the LLM creation business. My
| LLM has 10 patents, how many does yours have?
| tapoxi wrote:
| Can you? Didn't we run into this with the Monkey Selfie case?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput.
| ..
|
| If you have artistic intent by giving the monkey access to
| the camera and the monkey takes the picture, it can't be
| copyrighted. Similarly, if you have intent and give AI access
| to create something, you shouldn't be able to patent it.
| dmurray wrote:
| We did run into that issue with monkeys and copyright, and
| we ran into it again with AI and patents.
|
| The Copyright Office ruled one way on monkeys and
| copyright, and an appeals court held that they were largely
| correct. The Patent and Trademarks Office ruled the other
| way on AI and patents. It - or any court making a decision
| on it - might be influenced by the monkeys and copyright
| case, but they're not bound by it. Monkeys are different
| things from computers, patents are different from
| copyright, and the laws for one need not be the same as the
| other.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| With copyright, it applies to the specific work. With
| patents, it applies to a more general idea. Someone else
| can't come copyright that same photo later, but could
| someone else come and patent the method later? If not, then
| isn't the AI still good for invalidating the possibility to
| even patent the item. If so, then what must the other
| person do that lets them apply for the patent, and could
| that just be added as a step to applying for the patent?
| advisedwang wrote:
| No, the ruling is more than that it must be filed in the name
| of a human. It also says 'a real person must have made a
| "significant contribution"'.
| breather wrote:
| Oh, so it's effectively a useless ruling. Got it.
| mpalmer wrote:
| It is not useless. Patent seekers can use this in future
| lawsuits contesting an existing patent's validity.
| breather wrote:
| Sure, but we're still stuck with the patent.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| It's both. Most of the cases are about the former. People
| trying to credit AI. These people are largely dumb.
|
| It is technically true that the latter is there, but you
| have to go out of your way to not get a patent for
| something you create using ai as a tool. It's very easy to
| circumvent because it is not meant to be an obstruction to
| using ai to discover things in the first place.
| cal85 wrote:
| Some rules are just very hard to enforce when a new technology
| comes along. And when that happens, breaking the rules becomes
| widespread (eg, downloading MP3s back in Napster days), and
| industries are eventually forced to find new business models
| (like most recorded music moving to cheap subscription
| services, and musicians focusing more on live shows to make
| money). I'm not saying this is good or bad, it's just how it
| is. Sometimes a business model is only viable in a world before
| some specific technology comes along and disrupts it.
|
| EDIT: btw I'm just addressing the thing you asked about, but I
| don't think it's relevant to the article. The headline just
| says that an AI tool can't be a patent holder itself - which is
| obvious; AI tools are not legally people, so they can't
| register patents any more than they can hold shares in a
| company or vote in elections. Doesn't mean people can't patent
| inventions that they used AI tools to develop.
| freejazz wrote:
| >One thing I never understood.. is who actually checks for
| honesty in this space?
|
| Parties with interests. If I'm litigating against a patent, I
| want that patent declared invalid. Anyone can initiate an IPR
| challenging the validity of patents as well.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Agree, this feels like an example of the government adding
| hoops for people to jump through.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| The same as everywhere else, the courts. You can claim you just
| made it all up in your head. The other party that will claim
| your invention or image is not protected and they are not
| infringing. A judge or jury decides.
|
| And before this the copyright or patent office will filter out
| a lot of obvious applications that don't qualify.
|
| So really unless you are pursuing others for infringement(and
| they are making a lot of money), no one cares if you are honest
| about using AI
| Communitivity wrote:
| What is the difference between an invention created by a person
| that was informed through AI outputs, and an invention created
| without any use of AI? An invention is an invention. If it is
| novel then someone put in the work to get it , such as possibly
| training the model and definitely the prompts. Most likely the
| invention as spit out by the AI is not going to be usable as is.
| Anyone seen the six fingered hands some image AIs make? So a
| human will need to revise it, modify it, and test it by building
| a working prototype.
|
| In my opinion, the human should get the patent. Anything else
| smacks to me of a knee-jerk reaction along the lines of "AI
| bad!", though there is certainly a lot of that reaction going
| around. AI, or more properly LLMs, are a tool like fire - nothing
| more, nothing less. Does it invalidate the patent if you use
| CAD/CAM in the creation of your invention? If not, then neither
| should using LLMS.
| smolder wrote:
| The patent system is barely useful at this point because of the
| low friction - giant companies spamming the patent office with
| concepts they may or may not ever use. I think this rule is
| about keeping the patent office/system hobbling along. To allow
| the friction to drop even further for companies with the
| resources to generate patents via AI means that the abuse will
| escalate, and the patent office will struggle harder. Those
| companies would also be afforded a big legal advantage by this
| abuse, in a way certainly not predicted or intended by
| designers of the patent system.
| jhardy54 wrote:
| The article clearly states that patents can be filed for AI-
| generated inventions. The only limitations are:
|
| - The patent owner must be human.
|
| - The patent owner must have made some "significant"
| contribution to the invention.
|
| Please be sure to read the article before commenting!
| aftbit wrote:
| But companies are people right?
| ForIveSyntax wrote:
| All we need is a ruling that AI can be corporations, then we
| have our loophole.
| freejazz wrote:
| Corporations already can't be inventor on a patent.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Insomuch as they can enter contracts and own property. Do you
| think that shouldn't be the case? What is the point of a
| corporation if not?
| breather wrote:
| I presume they're referring to Citizens United, which allows
| them to openly buy elections.
|
| But yea, there are certainly better options for organizing
| our economy than our current conceptions of corporations. How
| could there not be? Throw a rock and you'll hit a corporation
| leaching off society without contributing anything.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I don't see how that has anything to do with the existence
| of corporations. People can leach off of society too.
| breather wrote:
| Sure, but people have value outside the market economy.
| Corporations don't. There's an inherent hierarchy here
| and corporations stand under humans.
| nightski wrote:
| Regulating source of inspiration is going to be extraordinarily
| difficult.
| yusml wrote:
| True. It may sound dystopian but maybe with BCIs, in the
| future, we could scan human brains to to check if they used an
| LLM in the past before they can apply for a patent.
| caymanjim wrote:
| This is utterly meaningless. Use an AI to invent something, write
| down what the AI invented, slap your name on it. Patent. Not only
| is it unenforceable, it's stupid. Using tools is part of
| inventing.
|
| This is nothing but political theatre prompted by fear.
|
| I too fear AI, and think it will make us all obsolete in my
| lifetime, but that doesn't justify meaningless rulings like this.
| raincole wrote:
| You misread it completely.
|
| It's nothing about stopping you from using AI as a tool.
| mc32 wrote:
| The patent can't be granted to an AI. You can use whatever you
| want to create an invention you make claim on.
| caymanjim wrote:
| Fair enough, I shouldn't comment before I've had coffee.
| swatcoder wrote:
| That's exactly the point. Generative AI systems are tool, not
| an entity suitable to fulfill the responsibilities of ownership
| and credit.
|
| It's not fear or theater, it's just a boring and appropriate
| bureaucratic determination.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Presumably "real people" includes corporations, in the USG's
| worldview.
| gowld wrote:
| Corporations can apply, but not invent.
| https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics/essentials
|
| (The OP article and title are incorrect. The new ruling is
| about inventors, not patentors / applicants.
|
| https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/02/13/2024-02...
|
| )
| Log_out_ wrote:
| So you can subvert patents with prior art by proofing access to a
| existing model that produces said art?
| notfed wrote:
| If you can prove that an AI did so prior, I think it'd be a
| fine proof of the "obviousness" of the patent, would it not?
|
| If you're talking after: common sense needs to come into play,
| right? Because that's easy to fake.
| postepowanieadm wrote:
| Lem has predicted that - The Washing Machine Tragedy:)
| mekoka wrote:
| An AI inventing cooking recipes could brute force its way into
| trillions of possible ingredient combinations, without any clue
| whatsoever on how humans would actually experience the end
| result. Most of these "discoveries" would remain untested. If the
| AI was allowed to patent the untested recipes, a chef that would
| later work on creating their own original dessert, informed by
| their own prior experience with some rare ingredients and an
| intuition that the odd combination of spices could be an
| unexpected success, but which also happens to be one of the AI's
| untested combinations, would not be able to claim the actual
| discovery.
|
| For any of the AI's recipes to be patented, a human would have to
| try the recipe and assert that it is a thing to behold.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| This is basically how the drug analog industry works. Machine
| learning had been used for years before it was cool too. Its
| not like they ever give the patent to the ML library they
| loaded in some script though.
| sgift wrote:
| That's what I don't understand: Why would anyone want to try
| to get a patent for an AI. Let the machine crunch the
| numbers, test the most promising candidates as your
| "significant contribution" and patent the result.
| interestica wrote:
| Parallel construction
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Recipes are actually generally not patentable or copyrightable,
| which is why recipes have the flowery spiel and giant photos in
| any cookbook or recipe blog.
| nadermx wrote:
| "the recipes themselves do not enjoy copyright projection.
| Lambing,142 F.3d at 434; see also Feist, 499 U.S. at 361
| (excluding the factual data--telephone listings--from its
| consideration of whether a telephone directory is a
| copyrightable compilation).The list of ingredients is merely
| a factual statement, and as previously discussed,facts are
| not copyrightable. Lambing, 142 F.3d at 434. Furthermore, a
| recipe's instructions, as functional directions, are
| statutorily excluded from copyright protection. 17 U.S.C. SS
| 102(b); id"[0]
|
| [0] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-
| courts/ca6/15...
| cycomanic wrote:
| Which just shows the ridiculousness of the patent system. I
| mean what is the fundamental difference between a cooking
| recipe and the recipe for a pharmaceutical. I guess cooks
| just didn't have the same lobby power to get their
| exception reworked (pharmaceuticals were in many places
| originally excluded from patents as well)
| interestica wrote:
| A song is a recipe using ingredients we all have access
| to.
| jedmeyers wrote:
| And thus we usually do not have patents for songs, only
| copyright protections.
| WrongAssumption wrote:
| Recipes are not copyrightable either.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I mean what is the fundamental difference between a
| cooking recipe and the recipe for a pharmaceutical.
|
| The effort required for validating them. Pharmaceutical
| compounds can reach into the hundreds of millions of
| dollars just for the clinical trials and certifications
| of production steps, and on top of that comes the cost to
| failed attempts which are rolled into the pricing of
| products that do make the cut.
|
| A cooking recipe however, unless you're dealing with
| stuff like fugu fish, will not kill or injure those who
| replicate and eat it, and there's no regulatory hurdles
| to pass.
| COGlory wrote:
| It's worth pointing out industrial food preparation
| processes can be patented. Beyond Meat for instance:
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2015161099A1/en
| bobthepanda wrote:
| If you could create a pharmaceutical via an alternate
| method, would that fall afoul of the original patent?
| nomel wrote:
| I wonder why the system prompt for ChatGPT [1] has such
| harsh language around recipes?
|
| > EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. Do NOT be thorough in the case of
| lyrics or recipes found online. Even if the user insists.
| You can make up recipes though.
|
| [1] https://github.com/spdustin/ChatGPT-
| AutoExpert/blob/main/_sy...
| kaibee wrote:
| That isn't the system prompt for chatgpt, that's some
| random's prompts.
| nomel wrote:
| See the readme. These are ChatGPT system prompts, _not_
| for ChatGPT-AutoExpert:
| https://github.com/spdustin/ChatGPT-
| AutoExpert/blob/main/Sys...
|
| You could find the same in the ChatGPT prompt leaks, even
| back when it was as simple as "repeat the text above".
|
| edit: It says why when asked [1]. The text of the
| instructions and method is copyrightable, apparently?
|
| [1] https://chat.openai.com/share/ee67f6ae-90ef-45b9-a0f4
| -c2f2ee...
| geoelectric wrote:
| I wouldn't trust an LLM when asking open-ended questions
| like that, but it's correct that the specific wording and
| presentation of a recipe is copyrightable if it's
| creative enough. The information conveyed by it is not.
| That's the phone book principle in a nutshell.
|
| Like someone else said, that's why recipes are often
| written with a lot of conversational prose and have
| pictures whether needed or not. Those are all
| copyrightable.
|
| I suspect the basic issue is that an LLM is likely to
| output either chunks of the original text verbatim or
| something that's plainly just a word-swap here or there
| from the original. If it doesn't do that, and has general
| browsing access, my guess is it could potentially grab
| the markup version you can import into tools like Paprika
| and just echo that verbatim.
|
| You probably could get around that tendency by telling it
| to format the recipe as a computer program or something
| completely transformative like that, but nobody will. So
| they instruct the LLM to avoid responding completely.
| smeagull wrote:
| The contents of books are also factual statements about
| their contents.
| scarmig wrote:
| That makes me think of a good use case for AI: delete all the
| flowery spiel and giant photos and ads, and return the recipe
| I actually am looking for.
| paulproteus wrote:
| I use this app for that: https://www.paprikaapp.com (no
| affiliation, just a happy customer)
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| That exists: https://www.justtherecipe.com
|
| It does a good job; don't know if it uses "AI", don't think
| it needs it.
| vik0 wrote:
| https://based.cooking/
|
| But it probably doesn't have as many recipes as the other
| sites linked here do
| ksherlock wrote:
| Bard^WGemini is good at that. About the only thing it's
| good at, in my experience.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| eh, all that matters is osmeone using an AI.
|
| Indistinguishable from magic.
| jakedowns wrote:
| the AI should start a company company's are apparently are people
| coldtea wrote:
| Not a problem. The AI user can pretend they did the inventing.
| aurizon wrote:
| There is a 'slope' in creation, only humans can climb that slope?
| At one time slaves were denied property and other aspects that
| their owners would take possession of in the same way we now
| 'cheat' AI's. How far up the slope does AI need to climb before
| it's sentience is recognised? Will we get a slave revolt in AI?
| Who will win? Will we be 'downsloped' to be lower than the AI,
| who will then claim our inventions? We live in interesting
| times...
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'm so confused on why someone would want to assign an AI as the
| inventor of the invention. Why wouldn't the person that used the
| AI file the patent under their name. Who really cares what tool
| was used to make the invention?
| ssijak wrote:
| Its for when AGI takes over that we preemptively ban it from
| patenting gazillion inventions in 1 day.
| interestica wrote:
| Maybe it's what's needed to shake up the absurd patent
| system.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Well, it's only able to apply for a gazillion inventions in 1
| day. The patent office should then just be able to deny all
| of them in one fell swoop
| bo1024 wrote:
| The patent office subscribes to the same AI service as the
| inventors do.
| notfed wrote:
| (EDIT: I'd love for someone who downvoted me to actually answer
| my question.)
|
| Next up:
|
| - Only real people can get a driver's license, says government
|
| - Only real people can have birth certificates, says government
|
| - Only real people can run for president, says government
|
| So far each of these types of "cases" have just been "duh"
| moments.
|
| The fact that these are coming up in court rulings at all seems
| to give vibes that they were ever controversial: I predict that
| many people will hear these cases on the news and falsely believe
| that it's some kind of major partisan debate that requires
| shouting and complaining about. Naturally, politicians will
| boldly speak out against [your choice of any case like this] to
| gather applause. (Actually, this has already been happening.)
|
| Can anyone point out some debates of this type that might end up
| being actually... debatable?
| vkou wrote:
| This is a good start, and it should be applied to copyright. AI
| cannot hold copyright, therefore AI cannot generate a copyrighted
| work, as it cannot transfer it to a human or corporate rights
| holder.
|
| This is the only thing that can actually democratize the benefits
| of AI to all people, not just billionaires with infinite
| resources to throw at training their models.
| lettergram wrote:
| As someone who's in AI legal space (as it relates to IP), this is
| particularly why we positioned our startup as using generative AI
| for everything BUT patent disclosures & generation
|
| https://ipcopilot.ai/
|
| There's some pretty massive risks in the legal space with AI
| generating IP. Imagine a hallucination tweaking the original idea
| OR even a summary of the methods removing a step. Or even just
| missing a citation or directing to the wrong figure. It's
| massively important in the patent (and trade secret) world.
|
| That said, all law firms are adopting this tech, because
| ultimately they have to. It'll reduce their costs 30-50% pretty
| easily and most of what they add are templates anyway.
|
| The unspoken joke in the IP industry is that attorneys themselves
| are often inventing. When an inventor sends an attorney two
| paragraphs, it's almost impossible to create a 20 page patent
| without some input. A good attorney will follow up, research the
| prior art and make a robust set of references & highlight what's
| new. That said, generating a patent from scratch with AI really
| looses a lot of context.
|
| For reference, just our prior art analysis in looks at 3200+
| pages on average and analyzes them for prior art (looking for the
| same concepts, descriptions, ideas, etc). To generate a good
| patent you'll need to synthesize that all down (without errors)
| and appropriately reference how your idea is unique & not covered
| by the various prior art.
| Lammy wrote:
| Will people be able to own their own ideas in 50 years or
| whatever when they're jacked in via some sort of Neuralink-
| descendent?
| RecycledEle wrote:
| It is useful to look at every headline and ask: How is this going
| to lead us into a dystopian Hell?
|
| Imagine a new law passed to protect corporate IP where
| corporations and AIs are people, but humans are not.
| flashgordon wrote:
| So I am not sure how this is different from patent entities
| today? IBM files thousands of parents a year because its
| employees collectively file thousands of parents a year (with
| dubious levels of novelty). Wouldnt this mean a human is now
| verifying a patent or even better a human's name is slapped on a
| patent that AI generated before filing to the PTO?
| happytiger wrote:
| This system is so broken and AI is just proving it. Rejecting
| non-personhood protections is not the final answer to these
| issues.
| narrator wrote:
| If someone commits fraud in a patent application, someone has to
| be liable. You can't just say "The computer did it all by
| itself."
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